The growing need for delivery staff is likely to put more pressure on restaurants like Domino's and retailers that rely on home delivery.Bengaluru: Flipkart wants to build human brain-like capabilities, using big data and the power of mobile phones to sell smarter to its more than 45 million registered online buyers.

“The larger problem we are tackling is how do we make sure that Flipkart is providing all the technology which enables ecommerce in India,” Flipkart’s new head of engineering Peeyush Ranjan told ET in an interview.

Flipkart’s plan is to apply a combination of big data analytics, social shopping and a mobile-first approach to keep its lead in the market. With over 45 million registered users, Flipkart has a large amount of customer and transaction data that can be mined for insights.

“If we understand what our users really want, that’s good for us... Understanding user affinity is an example of a problem we are thinking about,” said Ranjan, a former Google executive who joined Flipkart in May.

The company recently hired data scientist Mayur Datar, also a former Googler, as principal data scientist to work on such problems.

The other big agenda for Flipkart is to bridge the gap in user experience between online and offline shopping.

“Leveraging technology to bring online shopping as close to real world shopping and maybe go a little further is the other thing we think of,” said Ranjan. For instance, Ping, the recently launched messaging service inside the Flipkart app, could include a shopping assistant, he said.

Flipkart also wants to use computer vision, or the ability of computers to learn how to recognise images as well as human beings. Last month, the company hired Krishnendu Chaudhury, an image scientist who used to work on the Google brain project that sought to teach computers how to recognise things like images and audio just as human beings do.

“Computers are using data to learn and become closer to what a human brain does. And we want to be able to leverage that,” said Ranjan. Flipkart could use image recognition to automatically generate tags and descriptions for products.

It has already launched an image search feature in the fashion category. As the head of engineering, the large problems Ranjan is looking to solve revolve around helping buyers and sellers, understanding demand, search, discovery of products and making sure that Flipkart’s customer service is the best in class.

“Each of these problems areas will have to innovate on their own. The problem statement and investment is top-down but what should be done is bottom-up,” he said. Ping was the result of ideas from the buyer engagement team. Flipkart will also take a mobilefirst approach and align its engineering teams to focus on building products and features for mobile users.

Ranjan said the company’s ‘Big App Shopping’ days, during which it sells goods on a discount, have already registered bigger sales than last year’s ‘Big Billion Day,’ when it sold discounted products worth . Rs 100 crore on a single day.

“Image search is just a start. Increasingly you will see focus on social, predictive and real-life shopping and making sure that the difference between mobile shopping and desktop shopping is bridged,” Punit Soni, chief product officer at Flipkart, told ET in a telephone interview.

Ranjan will also run all the infrastructure and technologies that power various divisions at Flipkart as its chief technology officer.